Salée: Indigenous issues are complex

By Barbara Black

Political scientist Daniel Salée was a bit surprised when he arrived at the Université de Québec à Montréal to give an academic lecture to find a large audience that included members of the general public as well as the anticipated knot of fellow scholars. “There were about 80 people in the room,” he exclaimed afterwards.

The reason: Salée was talking about Quebec’s relations with aboriginals, and his talk came only brief weeks after the torching of the grand chief’s house at Kanasatake, a small native community west of Montreal. Obviously, people wanted him to address the issue of native autonomy, or lack of it.

Salée doesn’t think he provided any pat answers for his expectant audience. He can see nothing but complexity and nuance on the subject, and his intention was simply to analyze the problem.

“There are superficial, surmountable problems, such as the insertion of language [French and English] into the debate, and the tendency of the federal government to confuse the issue of territorial integrity by supporting the idea of native partition [in the case of a unilateral declaration of Quebec sovereignty].

“There are also issues that are more deeply ingrained and harder to solve. We live in an era of individual rights, so we have low tolerance for hierarchies of identities. This is a problem for Quebec francophones, but it’s an even bigger problem for indigenous peoples.”

He continued, “The notion of multiculturalism is seen as a panacea, but the terms and conditions of that membership are dictated by groups whose history has afforded them a dominant position in society.”

Salée said that his paper, delivered in French at UQAM on Jan. 28, was a response to liberal theorists who fail to acknowledge the dynamics of power. “The theorists of the liberal centre think that issues of relations among communities can be resolved simply through goodwill.”

To those who suggest that the government would have done better to adopt the 1969 proposal by the Trudeau government to integrate natives into the larger Canadian society, Salée said that the native people themselves rejected the idea, and are less likely than ever to agree now.

“There’s a growing sense of empowerment” in native communities, he said. Unfortunately for power dynamics, “they simply don’t have the numbers and the constitutional latitude to give real substance to it.”

Salée said Quebec has been enjoying a honeymoon following land deals in the North with the Cree and the Innu, but not everyone in the aboriginal communities affected is happy over the terms.

Moreover, Salée sees growing potential for conflict within the indigenous communities themselves. “Kanasatake is the tip of the iceberg.”

While Salée is principal of the School of Community and Public Affairs, he is spending this academic year as a visiting chair of Quebec Studies at Glendon College, a bilingual college of York University in Toronto. While he loves Toronto, he misses Montreal, and he will be back at Concordia on June 1.